Social Media, Digital Marketing & PR Agency

Facebook is bad for your marriage according to research carried out by an online divorce service in the United Kingdom.

Divorce-Online scanned their divorce petition database for the use of the
word “Facebook” and found 989 instances of the word in over 5,000 divorce
petitions sampled.

This means that just under 20% of all the petitions filed through the
company had references to Facebook within the text of the divorce
petitions.

Managing Director Mark Keenan said “I had heard from my staff that there
were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners
on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was I was really
surprised to see 20% of all the petitions containing references to
Facebook. The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate
sexual chats with people they were not supposed to”.

According to recent research by content management association AIIM, on average 51% of the paper documents scanned by user organisations are born digital, having been output directly from a computer application.

The survey also found that 25% of scanned documents are photocopied before
being sent for scanning, and that only 31% are destroyed after scanning,
indicating a reluctance by users and organisations to lose sight of mission
critical documents. On balance, however, the number of users who reported a
decrease in the volume of paper and photocopies as a result of scanning was
the same as the number who reported an increase.

The AIIM report compares strategies for outsourced, centralised and
distributed scanning, and concludes that there is a move back to
centralised scanning operations, along with a greater investment in capture
and recognition software to automate data capture and document indexing
processes. Although outsourcing delivers cost and management benefits,
quality of indexing and difficulty of integration back into electronic
archives are given as the biggest disadvantages.

Doug Miles, Director of Market Intelligence for AIIM, comments, “We have
seen a steady increase in the use of scanning and capture as an input to
business processes, with 42% of documents now being scanned-to-process
rather than scanned-to-archive. Proximity to the process, and the level of
integration with other enterprise systems become more important in these
applications. Users find that distributed processing with departmental
scanners and MFPs improves ownership by the process owners, but office
staff and knowledge workers need training and encouragement to ensure
accurate indexing.”

The AIIM survey also found that 46% of users report payback on their
scanning and capture investments within 12 months, with two-thirds seeing
returns within 18 months. These returns are consistent across many types of
content and process, with invoices, contracts and application forms being
the most popular.
Based on over 850 responses, the AIIM research report is entitled
“Capture: local, central, outsource – what’s working best?”  Part of
the AIIM Industry Watch series, the full report is free to download from
the AIIM website. It is underwritten by Abbyy, Autonomy, EMC Corporation,
Epson, Image Source, and Visioneer.

UK’s largest homegrown news aggregator refuses to sign Newspaper Licensing Agency agreement, branding it “unacceptable and of questionable legitimacy”

NewsNow.co.uk, the UK’s largest homegrown news aggregator, is to pull all links to many national newspaper websites from its subscription service as a result of a failure to reach agreement with The Newspaper Licensing Agency Limited (the NLA) over the NLA’s proposed “Web Database Licence” scheme. However, links to NLA member publications will remain available via NewsNow’s free website. The NLA had issued an ultimatum to NewsNow to sign its new “Web Database Licence” by Thursday, December 10th, 2009, or face the prospect of immediate legal action.  The “Web Database Licence” purported to license NewsNow’s use of headlines linking to NLA member publications in NewsNow’s subscription service. However, in NewsNow’s view, the legal basis for the NLA’s claims that a licence is or was required remain unsubstantiated. Although NewsNow believes it has a strong case, it did not feel it could justify the considerable costs of pursuing the matter in court at this time. According to Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of NewsNow: “Unfortunately, we have not been able to reach an agreement with the NLA. In spite of the NLA’s claims to the contrary, we continue to maintain that what they are demanding of ourselves and our customers is unacceptable and of questionable legitimacy. Irrespective of the lack of a legal basis, the NLA’s licence is not fit for purpose. This is not just about the charges they intend to impose on us, but the charges they would also impose on our customers for receiving and circulating links within their own organisations. In addition, it is a perhaps an under-reported fact that the terms dictated by the NLA scheme would oblige us to hand over customer details to the NLA, which seems to be developing a potential rival service itself. It is hard to imagine that this kind of behaviour would be tolerated in any other sector. The NLA has also offered no reasonable guarantees of limitations on the increase of costs over time. We strongly feel that to accept the NLA’s terms would set a dangerous precedent restricting our customers’ ability to conduct their business freely. We see this as a ‘slippery slope’ towards any free-to-access website demanding licence fees from any organisation for circulating or clicking on links.” Newspaper titles that NewsNow is to pull from its subscription service include The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror. A full list of NLA member publications can be obtained at http://www.nla-web.co.uk/downloads/NLA%20Licensed%20Websites.pdf. Bartlett added: “We have worked extremely hard to seek clarification from the NLA and its solicitors on the legal basis for either NewsNow or our customers requiring a licence. I am sorry to say that the NLA has not substantiated the legal basis for its licence. Indeed in our view its arguments do not hold water. We believe that other organisations who privately agree with our position have reluctantly signed the NLA agreement under pressure. However, we are not in a position on our own to fund an extremely costly legal case on behalf of an entire industry. Regretfully, we will therefore as a precautionary measure be removing all links to NLA member publications from our subscription service. We will continue to seek clarification of the legal basis for the NLA’s web licensing scheme.”

Independent News & Media has partnered with iome to launch the first white-labelled social event planning tool on The Independent newspaper’s website. The service creates new web and mobile revenues for the publisher, as part of its 2010 digital media strategy.

The free-to-access service provides the 10 million* monthly visitors to the
Independent’s website with a useful tool that helps them plan their social
lives and make savings via discount vouchers.  In this socially-connected
world, with demands on people’s time and money, consumers want to easily
discover new things to do and places to go, find offers and share that
information with friends; until now, no one service has been able to
provide consumers with an easy way to do so.  The iome white-label service
fills this gap.

The Independent will generate new revenues through the service, on
purchases made through the portal (such as theatre tickets and restaurant
bookings) in addition to advertising and sponsorship.  And, by partnering
with iome, the Independent has been able to go to market with its new
branded service in less than three weeks from inception of the project,
enabling readers to start using the service in time to organise their
Christmas events.

Bill Swanson, managing director (Digital), Independent News and Media (UK)
said: “We are very excited to be the first business to launch this service
in the UK.  It not only enables us to extend our reach to readers, but also
to create new revenues via web and mobile.  We recognise that consumers are
hungry for new ways to organise their social lives through the web – this
service is the first of its kind to enable people to organise themselves,
make savings and interact with friends in a single location.  Plus, the
service has the ability to learn behaviour including likes and dislikes,
giving us the opportunity to deliver highly targeted services and offers.
This is a significant step forward with our digital media strategy for
2010.”

Added Phil Eames, CEO, iome: “People like to share information online and
there are a plethora of sites out there that help with individual elements.
The iome service lets people not only identify what’s going on near them,
but also access discounts, make bookings, create plans and share them with
friends via Facebook and other such sites.  It gives businesses the
opportunity to develop a better understanding of their consumers, allowing
for greater targeted services, content and advertising to be offered in the
future.”

Today is ‘Cyber Monday’ where online retailers are forecast to have record sales which top £350m.

The first Monday on December is forecast each year to be the highest spending day of online sales as the run up to Christmas starts in earnest.

As shoppers throw the recession away for the festivities, the online shopping sales were already up by 17% last month from November 2008.

Last week, John Lews said that they saw the ‘best ever sales’ on both their online store and high street shops.

According to statistics the busiest hours for this epic online shopping spend will be between 1pm and 2pm GMT.

Even here at The Media Marketing Co office we are spending some time today online shopping, so we will certainly be adding to those record breaking online sales.  At least with online shopping you don’t have to park the car!

Blackwell, the UK’s leading academic bookseller, has launched a new online magazine subscription service in partnership with magazine group ThreePM.

The new magazine service offers more than 850 titles including specialist
and B2B magazines as well as more popular titles. With Blackwell’s historic
strength in specialist, academic and professional markets the integration
of upmarket magazine publications will provide even greater product choice
for Blackwell customers.

Jessica Armishaw, head of online, said: “We feel that this is the ideal
time to launch a new magazine subscription service in the run up to
Christmas. Magazines make fantastic gifts, especially for that
hard-to-buy-for relative. The site provides subscriptions for a diverse
range of titles from The Economist, National Geographic, Country Life,
Wired and the Spectator to the less familiar Selvedge, Nano and Decanter
Magazine.”

The  various categories including arts and culture, business and finance,
career and industry, computers and technology, food and home, hobbies and
leisure, lifestyle, motoring and transport, news and current affairs,
science resources, women’s interest and even overseas titles.

Adding magazines to the diverse range of books already available from
Blackwell Online further substantiates Blackwell as The Knowledge Retailer.